ADA compliant websites, built that way from the start.
Accessibility isn't a feature you bolt on before launch. It's a few hundred small decisions about markup, contrast, focus, and labelling — and almost all of them are cheap while you're building and expensive to retrofit.
What does ADA compliance mean for a website?
The short version: the Americans with Disabilities Act doesn't contain a checklist for websites. It never mentions them. What's happened instead is that courts and the Department of Justice have repeatedly pointed at an existing technical standard — the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), Level AA — as the practical measure of whether a site is usable by people with disabilities.
So when someone says "make my site ADA compliant," what they're actually asking for is conformance with WCAG 2.1 Level AA. That's the target I build to.
I'm an engineer, not an attorney. I can tell you what your site does and doesn't do, and I can fix it. I can't tell you what your legal exposure is — if you're responding to a demand letter, talk to a lawyer as well as to me.
Please don't buy an accessibility overlay
You've probably seen the pitch: paste in one line of JavaScript, get a little accessibility icon in the corner, and you're compliant. It's an appealing offer and I want to be direct with you about it — it doesn't work.
These widgets try to guess at meaning your markup never gave them. They can't know what an image depicts, which heading is a heading, or what an unlabelled form field is asking for. Accessibility practitioners have organised against them in public, and — the part that matters commercially — businesses running overlays have still been sued. Screen reader users frequently report that the overlay makes a site harder to use, not easier.
There's no shortcut here. The fix is correct markup, and correct markup is work.
What I find on almost every site
These six account for the large majority of real-world failures.
Low contrast text
Light grey on white looks refined in a design mockup and is unreadable to a good portion of your visitors. This is the single most common failure I see.
Images without alt text
Or worse, alt text that reads "IMG_4471.jpg". Decorative images need empty alt attributes; meaningful ones need a real description.
Keyboard traps
Menus, modals, and carousels you can tab into but not out of. If you can't operate the whole site without a mouse, neither can a lot of people.
Unlabelled form fields
Placeholder text is not a label. It disappears when typing starts, and screen readers may never announce it — leaving someone filling in a box with no idea what it wants.
Invisible focus states
Designers often strip the focus outline because it's "ugly". For keyboard users it's the cursor — removing it is like hiding the mouse pointer.
Headings used for styling
An h4 chosen because it looked the right size. Screen reader users navigate by heading structure — scrambled headings turn your page into a maze.
How I can help
An audit of the site you have
Automated tooling catches perhaps a third of real issues, so I combine it with manual keyboard and screen reader testing. You get a plain-English report ordered by severity, with what's wrong, where, and what it takes to fix — useful whether I do the work or your existing developer does.
Remediation
Fixing the findings on your existing site. How far this goes depends on what you're built on — some platforms cooperate, some fight you. I'll tell you honestly if remediation is going to cost more than rebuilding.
A new site, accessible by default
The cheapest accessibility work is the kind you never have to go back and do. Every site I build starts at WCAG 2.1 AA — it isn't an upgrade or a line item, it's just how I write markup.
If you run a medical practice, read this part
A good deal of my work has been for healthcare — cardiology, women's health, physical therapy, private practice. Medical sites carry more accessibility risk than most, for a reason that's easy to miss: your patients skew older, and are more likely to have vision, hearing, motor, or cognitive impairments than the general population. The people most likely to struggle with your website are exactly the people it exists to serve.
Patient portals, appointment booking, and intake forms are usually the worst offenders, because they're the most interactive parts of the site and often the least examined.
Not sure where your site stands?
Send me the URL and I'll take a look and tell you what I see — honestly, and without a sales pitch attached. If it's in decent shape, I'll tell you that too.
Ask Me to Look